Posts with «chess» label

Unsatisfied with the present options for chess computers and preferring the feel of a real board and pieces, [Max Dobres] decided that his best option would be to build his own.

Light and dark wood veneer on 8mm MDF board created a board that was thin enough for adding LEDs to display moves and for the 10mm x 1mm neodymium magnets in the pieces to trip the reed switches under each space. The LEDs were wired in a matrix and connected to an Arduino Uno by a MAX7219 LED driver, while the reed switches were connected via a Centipede card. [Dobres] notes that you’ll want to test that the reed switches are positioned correctly — otherwise they might not detect the pieces!

A small LCD screen and four buttons also connect to the Arduino for configuring options a number of options, computer difficulty, and play styles, while a Raspberry Pi acts as the main computer.

The Raspberry Pi is using ChessBoard 2.05 as a rule set with consideration for special moves (such as en passant and castling). It’s currently unsupported but used with permission by its creator, John Eriksson. The chess program Stockfish is the actual engine; be sure to adjust the skill of the AI, as it defaults to an ELO of 2600! Unfortunately, it’s a rather finicky program, only running on Python 2.7. If that doesn’t appeal to you, [Dobres] has provided a nice list of other options to help you with your own build.

He has recently updated his design and done away with the need for the Arduino in the process which — especially if you use the Pi Zero — drops the cost of this project significantly. That should leave you with enough room in your budget to build a robot to make the moves for you!

When The Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) planned the television broadcast of the Chess Olympiad 2014 in Tromsø, Norway, they encountered a challenge: how to mix video, graphics and the results of many ongoing chess games simultaneously, requiring 16 cameras for the games going on at the same time?

At first, the idea was to use a computer with a webcam for each of the 16 games, then mix video images, background animation and results in software on each of them.

Afterwards the finished mix of images would be streamed to separate channels in our web player, so that the online audience would be able to choose which game they wanted to follow. This solution would also provide our outside broadcasting van (OB van) with 16 finished video sources composed of video, graphics and results. This would make the complex job of mixing all video signals much easier.

After thorough thinking we came to the conclusion that for our web-audience, it would be better to skip the stream of individual games, and spend our resources on building websites that could present all games in the championship via HTML in real time. This would also give the audience the opportunity to scroll back and forth in the moves and recall all the previous games in the championship. We started working on it immediately, and you can find the result on our website nrk.no/sjakk.